World War II

Lee Springer

Age: 86

Branch: Navy

Served: Guadalcanal, 1943 to 1944

Hometown: Longmont

To mark Veterans Day 2011, Longmont Times-Call reporter Quentin Young and photographer Joshua Buck interviewed local veterans about their experiences at war. The six veterans who were interviewed served in six major conflicts involving the United States military: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq. The series includes feature stories and videos of the interviews, which may be viewed at timescall.com. The schedule:

Sunday: Lee Springer, World War II

Monday: Jerome Portz, Korea

Tuesday: Dan Pineda, Vietnam

Wednesday: Rick Chatwell, Gulf War

Thursday: Dane Shockley, Afghanistan

Friday: Gary Stump, Iraq

LONGMONT -- Lee Springer's scrapbook from World War II contains pictures of Guadalcanal's minimally clothed native women on one page and, on the next, the severed-head trophy of a Japanese fighter. The book's black-and-white photographs graphically convey the exotic, banal and hideous nature of war.

Springer was 18 when he was sent to Guadalcanal as a hospital corpsman. The Marines had already established themselves on the island when he arrived, but they were locked in a long, bloody battle with Japanese forces.

"We would get mobs of wounded Marines," Springer said.

Lee Springer was a Navy corpsman at a hospital in Guadalcanal during World War II before serving 20 years in the U.S. Air Force as an officer.
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Joshua Buck/Times-Call
)

He was too young to realize the full import of what he was seeing. But after so many years to reflect on his experience in Guadalcanal and on America's subsequent military engagements, he has gained a clearer perspective on the nature of war: "They don't do much good -- really just kill a lot of people."

The brutal fighting on Guadalcanal, in the western Pacific Ocean, started in August 1942, when the Americans and their allies launched one of the first major offensive actions in the Pacific theater. "There was hard fighting in a miserable climate," says a Navy history of the campaign, which was the subject of Terrence Malick's disturbing 1998 film, "The Thin Red Line."

In the Navy hospital, Springer was witness to the parade of casualties from the front lines. Individual patients stand out in his memory -- such as the one who had been hit by a rifle grenade, and another whose injuries left his nervous system so sensitive they had to keep a protective frame around his body. One Marine simply said, "No way am I going back," and the warrior's refusal to return to battle impressed on Springer how heinous it was. "It must have just been hell that they went through."

Starting this year, gay members of the military may serve openly, but the situation was quite different in World War II. Toward the beginning of Springer's deployment to Guadalcanal, authorities at the hospital arrested a man they determined was gay. They kept him locked in a cage near the hospital headquarters until they shipped him out, Springer said. Springer was "so naive" he didn't know what to make of the man or his imprisonment

A photo of Lee Springer during World War II, where he served in Guadalcanal as a Navy corpsman at a mobile hospital. Springer would go on to serve 20 years in the U.S. Air Force as an officer.

"I just ignored him, because I didn't know what to do or what to say," he said.

Though one of the war's most intense campaigns was raging on the island, much of Springer's time on Guadalcanal was occupied in unremarkable, workaday activities. He lived in a Quonset hut and ate "an enormous amount of peanut butter," he said.

After the war Springer made a 20-year career of the military as an Air Force officer. Then he became a psychologist.

Earlier this year, he traveled with other World War II veterans on an Honor Flight to visit the memorial to the war in Washington, D.C. He honors the warriors. But not the wars. Vietnam "didn't make much sense," he said, and he doesn't think so many American troops should be dying in the Middle East.